Government launches Open Data initiative

Earlier today, the Government launched its National Map Open Data initiative — to coincide with the GovHack 2014 event starting Friday this week. The map aggregates existing Government datasets and presents it in a centralised mapping tool for viewing.

I’m glad to see that the Government is taking initiative in making this kind of geospatial data more readily available to the public for analysis. Government-geospatial data has become progressively more accessible, especially since the establishment of data.gov.au, and it looks like more and more datasets should become available into the future.

A few downfalls though —

Hopefully, once some licensing kinks are ironed out (with Pitney Bowes), the MyBroadband analysis fully accessible as features, not images.

NBN Co rollout boundaries are still unavailable

Overall, an excellent initiative — great to see the Government take an open government approach to at least some aspects of their policies. Only hope the same level of transparency is carried out across all departments *coughs* on-water matters *coughs*.

I'm the author of jxeeno™ blog and co-founder of HSCninja.com. I'm a bit of an #NBN and public transport geek. You can normally find me juggling work and my studies at UNSW where I'm currently completing a degree in Geospatial Engineering.